These are incredible! I'm not even kidding, the group shot of the soldiers seems surreal, I initially thought they were just mock-ups or something
but they're not. Imagine having to fight in a blue uniform, not exactly the most inconspicuous thing and the soldiers look like they've been
transported back in time to fight the war.

Black and white photography doesn't really do any justice at all, its fantastic to see this colour photos. Really fantastic find!

Around that same time, in 1907, the first practical color photographic plates were introduced to the world by the Lumière brothers in France. The
plates were called "Autochrome Lumière," and they were made up of microscopic potato starch grains which were dyed orange, green, and blue;
sandwiched between black-and-white film and a piece of glass; then coated in shellac. The tiny starch grains acted as color filters, making the film
essentially a mosaic made up of many tiny pieces.

Once the black-and-white film base was developed, the dyed starch layer which had acted as many tiny color filters when the photo was taken now did
the same task in reverse, giving the color back to the underlying image. The technology was a bit crude and grainy, but it was able to capture full
color images which turned out looking rather impressionistic.

Autochrome film was expensive, slow and rare, so it didn't see a lot of use by the general public. But when World War One broke out in 1914, the
French army began photographing soldiers and scenery, and some of their photos were taken with this new color film. As a result, a large proportion of
color photos from that time are images of French soldiers in the field.

Not for me, mind you, but, for all my Modeling Friends at ArmoramA where I posted this link for them!
Don't get me wrong, I too enjoyed the color shots from that era, but, I did pass it on to friends I thought would really dig it.

Originally posted by sobolwolf
*sigh* I could see lots of sadness in those faces...

What a horrible time to be alive it must of been back then, notice the lack of smiles that we normally see in photographs taken in more recent
times.

Thanks for the link, I really enjoyed looking at those pictures - I even donated 5 bucks to the bandwidth jar

Might sound funny but that just used to be 'the thing' to do in pictures. Seriously.
My grandma has tons of pictures in her hallway and in all the older ones (many of them black and white) the people are not smiling. They used to think
it distorted the image of the person or something like that.
Odd, but I believe that was simply the trend back then.
Granted, those soldiers really might have been having a bad time, I def can't speak for them

I have also noticed people not really smiling in earlier years of photography. I'm sure there are more examples, but I think the only pic I have seen
with someone smiling from the old days was the one of Billy The Kid standing with his rifle and a smile on his face.

-Old time phtotography used to take a minute or two. Folks would have to hold still while the phtographer took the picture, and smiling's kind of
hard to do. Same reason why smiles weren't very big in portraits either.

im not sayin that ebaumsworld is a credible source but as far as im concerned it would be much easier for me to belive that a guy filled some photos
in with photoshop then rare colored pictures that were supposedly impossbile survived all this time and were only recently found out.

Originally posted by TrainDispatcher
Iv also learned how to colorize photos, 5 years at art school

Iv colorized many b&w family photos around here, cant even tell the difference.

"Im not saying it fake, Im just saying it can be done"

[edit on 21-10-2008 by TrainDispatcher]

No, these are completely legit and have not been colourised in recent times. They are quite well known to most WWI and history buffs. You won't see
much more than the French point of view though as it seems that they were the only ones using that technology.

There are plenty of books with these pictures and many many more, I have two great ones here now.

There was also a great documentary called WWI in colour, which, obviously showed loads of colour moving footage. I dunno if that was post production
colourisation though, I presume so.

EDIT: There is also a lot of beautiful pre-WWI colour pictures out there that are of the most astounding quality, much clearer and more colourful than
anything we had done until very recently.
I'm a history buff rather than a camera buff, so unfortunately I cannot remember the technique used but I will tell you that they honestly are
comparable to modern day Hi Def pics.

Yeah, smiling for a photograph back in the day was not the norm. First off, many people had yellowish teeth, so a smile was not something they were
proud of. But honestly, people wanted to look serious and impressive. If you smiled, you were obviously some sort of funny clownish person.

This content community relies on user-generated content from our member contributors. The opinions of our members are not those of site ownership who maintains strict editorial agnosticism and simply provides a collaborative venue for free expression.